China Mieville's Bas-Lag

[ShannonA]

I read Perdido Station several years ago now, shortly after it came out. I was impressed by the visual imagery, the refusal to be locked into any sort of genre norms, and genrally good storytelling chops.

On the downside I found the novel kind of plodding, probably due to that same attention paid to imagery.

A few weeks ago I picked up The Scar, the second book by Mieville set in the same world. THis time I was prepared for its style. It was still slow, taking much longer to complete than I'd have liked, but if anything the fantastic imagining was even more stunning than the first time.

It'll be a while before I'm ready to read Iron Council, but I'm excited to see Mieville's next sojourn into this strange world.

I'm actually reading his Un Lun Dun right now, having figuring it'd be lighter and quicker to read (and I've generally been right thus far).

Any other thoughts on Mieville?

[Tom B]

I've started Perdido Street Station about three times now, but always seem to get distracted before getting very far. It's frustrating because I liked what I read...it just wasn't holding my attention.

Looks like I have to be in the right frame of mind for it...but I haven't given up yet.

[The Disgruntled Poet]

I too read Perdido Street Station after hearing all the buzz for months and felt pretty much like the first poster. The writing was good (perhaps overwrought, but enjoyable and unique). The imagination at work was fantastic, the genre-twisting wonderful.

My biggest complaint was that I didn't find the plot nor the characters very compelling, and I felt like Mieville himself hadn't plotted the thing very tightly (well, how would I know?) Whereas the original poster used "plodding", I would say more that it was meandering, somewhat because China wanted us to see how cool New Cruzbon (sp?) was.

[Turbo]

I've read all of Mieville's novels, starting with King Rat. I think I like Un Lun Dun the most, followed by The Scar. Mieville's style is very rich, but I think he does better when he's got a tight narrative path rather than just going 'look at my rich world setting, I was a gamer can't you tell?' like Perdido Street Station sometimes did.

I think that Mieville's politics come across best in Iron Council, and I really like the chunk of western he threw into the genre stew with that one.

He's also got short fiction in the collection Looking for Jake, where you can find his novella "The Tain" which I think is my favorite Mieville work.

[Old Scratch]

I enjoyed PSS, although I found it a bit plodding. The Scar I enjoyed much, much, much more. On the other hand, the Iron Council was a big let down. It did have some great parts, but I found it a step down from the other two. I can't help but feel that sometimes his personal politics get in they way.

Then I read King Rat. I found it juvenile and overly fixated on its subject matter. This reads like a first novel, and in my opinion, a poor first novel.

Hand down though, my favorite by him is his short story collection, Looking for Jake. There are a few things in there that really miss, but overall the rest of the stories are some of the best short stories I've read in years. In fact, I consider it my favorite short story collection. And as noted earlier, The Tain is really something else.

[Olive]

Love PSS and The Scar. I agree there's occasionally an over focus on the world building but I found the characters in PSS particularly compelling.

This is the first Meiville thread I've ever read that didn't have anyone complaining about his politics. I like his politics (even if I don't always agree with the specifics) and so that's a big part of the appeal for me.

[Red Menace]

I think Mieville was running out of steam in Iron Council (pun not intended). The long flashback in the middle of the book was great, but what came before & after, less so. Even the monsters in IC seem less inspired, and seemed weird for the sake of being weird. Mieville has said that he has reams of Bas-Lag setting material, and I would love to see that material, but perhaps in role playing game form, rather than another novel.

[ShannonA]

This is the first Meiville thread I've ever read that didn't have anyone complaining about his politics. I like his politics (even if I don't always agree with the specifics) and so that's a big part of the appeal for me.

I haven't even noticed his politics in the first two books.

I suppose there was some populist thought in The Scar.

[Olive]

I haven't even noticed his politics in the first two books.

I suppose there was some populist thought in The Scar.

He's a member of the International Socialist Organisation/Socialist Worker Party. If you read the books with that in mind you might notice it more. It's probably a little more prominent in the Iron Council as well but it informs his creation of Bas Lag.

Basically it's pretty crude but he portrays workers, intellectuals, managers, aristocrats, politicians etc in certain ways pretty consistantly.

I found the interview where he discusses this stuff:

When I write a novel I do it to tell a story and describe a world that keeps readers interested in turning pages. My job in that book is not to convince people of socialism--a 700-page fantasy would be a spectacularly inefficient mode of propaganda. But obviously as a political writer of fiction it's inevitable that I'm a writer of political fiction.

I certainly try to engage with political ideas in my books. By doing so in fantasy, which has such a conservative tradition, you're engaging both with politics in general and with the politics of the genre you write in. There's politics in my books because it gives the worlds texture for me, and because I like investigating the ideas. If people do take away some of the politics then that's great, but I think I'd be setting myself up for serious disappointment as a socialist if that was my first aim with the novels. I don't think there's any replacement for traditional political activity and argument for pushing forward socialist politics.

I love weird fiction, ghost stories, horror comics and SF passionately, but they're not going to change the world. That's why I'm a novelist and an active revolutionary socialist.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj88/newsinger.htm

[Jack]

I loved the raw energy he put into King Rat, which I think he largely got back with Un Lun Dun, probably because of the new tone and subject matter. In fact, Un Lun Dun was one of the more creative books I've read in awhile...continuing the trend of "kiddie" fantasy often being better recently than "adult" stuff (and the trend of stuff like Un Lun Dun being much better than the really popular young adult stuff, IMO).

His short stories are generally fantastic. I admit to liking PSS and the like a bit less, but I still enjoy it.

[seljuk]

I've read PSS twice. I thought it was a bit loosely plotted but I'd never read any urban fantasy that was half so well-achieved (although this may indicate the shallowness of my reading). The Scar was equally good. IC was a big disappointment, mainly because I found the narrative was not really accessible if you don't share Mieville's political sympathies (I don't). I suppose it does make a change from the normally conservative politics of fantasy. And I'll probably buy the next one.

[Joebot]

Mieville's politics are definitely more overt in "Iron Council" than the earlier Bas-Lag books. There's a Marxist agenda, where the noble, heroic, free-thinking workers are pitted against the cruel, merciless corporate overlords. I personally didn't have a problem with it, but I suppose if you disagree with his politics, it might be more off-putting.

I totally agree with the above posters who mentioned his short story, "The Tain." I was scared to shave after reading that story!

In general, I think Mieville is an incredible world-builder. Sometimes he gets a little lost in his own worlds, and the plot meanders, but I always find his tangents and asides to be fascinating.

[Phantom Grunweasel]

Mieville doesn't do very much for me -I've read through Perdido Street Station and The Scar and the thought of slogging through Iron Council rather makes my heart sink. They're monstrously long and meandering, without much of a plot.

The characters are one-note, and just don't seem to have any real joy or colour to them -they're flatly cynical (or, for contrast, delusionally optimistic until they become flatly cynical) and Mieville just pushes them from one set piece to the next. The revelation about the bird-man's crime at the end of Perdido Street Station -that in no way felt like a real insight into him. It didn't feel like it suddenly made sense of his personality. It wasn't implausible, either, just because we simply didn't know him at all, despite the sections in italics from his point of view. It just felt like Mieville selecting a standard-issue tragic backstory and dark twist, that also allow him an artistically unhappy ending.

Set pieces, of course, make up the novel itself. I understand and sympathize with what Mieville's trying to do here -create a huge and baffling alien cityscape (shipscape, trainscape, etc), something like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. There are moments when it works for me. But so much of the rest of the time it doesn't. New Crobuzon doesn't fascinate and repel and obsess me the way Gormenghast does, or Lankhmar or Sigil or Viriconium. It feels like a jumble of random stuff all thrown together. The plots are like that, too, such as they are and they feel very secondary to the scene-setting. Even Gormenghast, meandering as it was, had a very gripping and tightly woven plot at its heart -Steerpike's rise to power contrasted with Titus' youthful heresies. And Peake's prose was simply far, far more readable than Mieville's.

You might think from all this criticism that I hate Mieville, but the fact is if that were so, I'd just shrug and move on. I see in him the potential for something really interesting, and so I just can't leave him alone.

[Vigorous Ape]

Iron Council is my favourite book. I thought PDD had a very pedestrian plot underneath the wonderful imagery. The Scar was good, but it was Iron Council where I think he really hit his stride, with the way he uses language. He was letting his prose do all the work rather than trying to hammer it into a narrative.